Medical treatments have conventionally been carried out in which therapeutic medications are formulated as infusions which are administered intravenously. Infusions employing therapeutic medications in the form of anticancer agents, nutrients, and the like must typically be administered in high dosages. Furthermore, where a plurality of medications are combined, each infusion must be administered in order, and the total administration dosage is quite high. On the other hand, as administration of infusions continues, because a sudden rise in the concentration of a drug within the blood increases the risk of occurrence of anaphylactic shock, cardiac arrhythmia, and other such side effects, there is a need for physicians and nurses to carefully continue to adjust infusion administration dose while monitoring the condition of the patient. However, carrying out administration by adjusting amount by means of injection is difficult, and as administration time goes on and the number of administrations increases, the patient experiences an increasing amount of bodily pain and is placed under an increasing amount of stress. For this reason, intravenous drip infusion is widely used as a technique for easily and continuously administering infusions to patients intravenously. During intravenous drip infusion, as medical equipment for causing a container having an infusion sealed therewithin to be connected to an intravenous drip needle that has been inserted within a blood vessel of a patient, an infusion set is employed, those in general use conventionally employing soft tubing to link the container having the infusion sealed therewithin with the intravenous drip needle, a mechanism employing a roller clamp and a drip chamber being provided midway along said soft tubing.
Before initiating intravenous drip infusion, physiological saline solution or other such infusion is made to pass through such an infusion set in advance, priming operations being carried out to adequately remove air in advance from the soft tubing, at which time it is necessary to pay adequate attention to ensure that air bubbles originating from such air are not allowed to enter the patient's blood vessel. However, with a conventional infusion set, even where caution is exercised there is a risk that an infusion may leak from the tip of the needle at the downstream-most end of the infusion set during priming, or that an accident could occur in which a hospital room or a hospital wing becomes contaminated, and so there has been a need for a strategy to prevent such accidents.
An infusion set has therefore been proposed that adopts a strategy to reduce the likelihood of leakage of dangerous drugs to the outside environment by splitting the region upstream of the drip chamber into multiple branches to establish two switchable priming flow paths, a shutoff clamp being arranged below the drip chamber and one of the priming flow paths being employed to carry out initial priming, and the priming flow path thereafter being switched, the shutoff clamp below the drip chamber being closed, and the other priming flow path thereafter being used to carry out priming of the remaining priming flow path (see Patent Reference No. 1).
However, while it may be true that the risk of contamination during initial priming is relatively low, the structure of the foregoing proposed infusion set is such that it permits leakage of the dangerous drug from below, and so from the standpoint of whether it adequately prevents leakage of dangerous drugs to the outside environment, there has been a need for further ingenuity. Furthermore, because the structure of the foregoing proposed infusion set is such that terminal portions of the infusion set are open, operations have been complicated inasmuch as there has been a need to exercise care with respect to procedural discharge of physiological saline solution or other such solution used during priming from said terminal portions, and inasmuch as there has been a need for priming, which itself comprises multiple procedural steps, to be carried out twice, and so forth. In addition, with the foregoing proposed infusion set, even where adequate care is exercised with respect to procedural discharge of liquid, there is a risk of occurrence of damage to equipment and/or contamination of the hospital room interior as a result of unintentional spillage of the physiological saline solution that is discharged therefrom onto the infusion set, the stand, the equipment used to carry out intravenous drip infusion, and/or the floor of the hospital room, and so there has been a need for even further ingenuity.
Furthermore, where a plurality of anticancer agents were administered in the form of infusions, it has been necessary to prepare an infusion set in which there are a plurality of sets of secondary tubing arranged therein, and particular attention has also been required to avoid mixture of solutions for which mixture is contraindicated and to see that administration is carried out in the correct order. However, it is often the case that the containers employed for infusions have similar external appearance. For this reason, mixups with respect to the order in which spikes pierce containers, confusion as to which infusion line should be used for different anticancer agent solutions, mistaken order of administration, and other such accidents can easily occur. Efforts have therefore been made to prevent accidents due to human errors by applying labels to the various containers at the time that the infusions are prepared, attaching written warnings, and so forth to clearly specify administration procedure, and to make the various containers recognizable, to establish standard procedures for use specific to each of the various infusion sets with their many different constitutions, to publicize this in advance, and carry out training and so forth, but the situation remains unchanged and misidentification by the operator can still occur, as a result of which there has been a need for improvement.